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Oh yes…the true beauty of Houston. It really makes one so proud to call Houston home. Houston is a case study on why government should but out and leave the free market to produce a truly zen like experience.

marvin, those pictures could have been taken in any major metropolitan area in the US. In fact I would argue that they could have been taken in any major metropolitan area in the world if you susbtitute brands of car and product. What exactly is your point?

I wonder how this person would feel about a landfill or water treatment plant next door to their home… definitely things we all need afterall. I guess we have a place to put them in the future, how selfless of you! :)

Oh boy does testicular fortitude call to mind those MICROSURGICAL VASECTOMY REVERSAL marquees. The interesting thing is that I thought we were supposed to find car-tropolis uninteresting. But Houston? For every five hardliners determined to call it boring, you’ll find yourself five hundred screeching or averring, “Too much!” —
Turns out that lifeless urbanism was the product less of sprawwwful choices than of a concern, in its essence equally urban and suburban, equally ‘top-down’ and ‘free-market’, to tidily farm territory for property value and to neatly safeguard that production run. But maybe that does disclose that ‘obsession with looking good’ or not is still somehow missing the point of the difference:
Being Houstonian is living with someone who won’t take care of herself. Still. And in that way not romantic, nothing romantic about it. After all of the altruistic positions and gut preferences have been stated, and after open opportunity here has been aired, celebrated and deconstructed, it seems to me (maybe enough bell-jar afternoons in hot cars, and nights of beef smoke, exploring streets of Houston, have rubbed the tread clean off of my mind) that the foundational assumption – of these of us who wanna see a balance of tradeoffs that leaves Houston more livably arranged – is a commonsense belief, “It’s probable we’ll be able to fix much of what’s wrong here without rolling back much of what Houston’s lovers pick up on in depth.” If that commonsense is true: well, let’s back up: the real question is whether that’s possible. In the case that it were, would we be having this talk at all? This city would have precious little that other cities lost. I submit to you, and bear with me here, that if such a tradeoff ( set out to help save this space from itself) had ever been so possible, we would all love Dallas very much.

When I was a kid in the 50s, I asked my dad what all those flares and stacks were on our left while driving to Galveston. His answer was “MONEY”. My family has made a good life here for over sixty years because of those stacks and flares.

If so many people love the lawless spraw, why do so many people choose heavily deed restricted neighborhoods? It isn’t that there is a lack of rules, simply that the jurisdictions are tiny and the King may be your obnoxious neighbor.
“If you have your health you have eveything” is a sentiment that apparently many do not agree with; better to be ugly, unhealthy and have money.

But as my late stepfather said “That is why Howard Johnson’s has 28 flavors- there is always some nut who wants pistachio.”